Sunday, October 19, 2008

Almost. But The New, Less-Painful Almost.

The '08 team truly was a Great Space Coaster. And we really did have a Subaru Summer. Lots of great moments, lots of fun. And when my team finishes a season one game away from the World Series, I can be happy and proud. Especially of these guys who did a lot, and wouldn't die even when everyone said it was over.

We look back at the last six seasons and see two championships, and four ALCS Game Sevens. The previous eighty-something years, it was no championships, and a total of just three league crowns. Again, we as Sox fans are happy. I wish we were going to the World Series right now and there are a lot of frustrating things I can look at in this series. But I don't think any of us will ever feel like we did after any of those pre-'04 seasons.

It makes it tougher when you think about how ours is the team that all three times that we were down 3-1 in an ALCS (once 3-0), we came back and won it. And this time we came up just short. The Rays never quit, either. Always being told they'd fold, and every single time, right up until the end of the ALCS, they held on. Now they go to the World Series.

As I tell you every year, stay tuned, because I've got a lot of crap to share with you in the offseason. I've already got an idea for the first Kwiz, and Kwiz Season officially begins now.

Again I've audio-taped for you (just close your eyes--the video is pointless) the last minutes of Joe Castiglione's sign-off, concluding with a piece of the great poem by A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Green Fields of the Mind, which Ken Coleman (who I grew up listening to) always used to sign off with:

Again, it's a different feeling from the pre-'04 days. You're not thinking for months about what could've been and how you thought it was finally "the year." But you hear that poem--and it always makes you sad, no matter what happened, that baseball is gone. Closed for the winter.

I left the radio on to hear that too. The rest of that essay is brilliant, it captures how the worst thing at the end of a season, win or lose, is losing that permanent daily background. Sigh. Summer's over.

"It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised."

I'm sadly proud. Jere, I even had to take a five minute time out while writing my morning post. But I got through it. It was great, wasn't it? I'll be listening for you on WTIC AM1080 this morning...blogger friend forever Peter.

Very nice post, Jere. I think you pretty much captured my feeling this morning. I was disappointed, and after the miracle Game 5 finish and Game 6 win, I was really expecting them to pull it out, but this is nothing like the devastating feeling of years past. I went into the ALCS thinking it was going to be a struggle; the Rays are young and very talented, and the Sox were just a little too banged up at a couple of key spots. I'm very happy and proud that they came back and made this a very competitive series, even if they fell a little short.

What is a little scary is that the Rays' best players are so young that they all probably improve from here, as well as the fact that they've got a few more yound studs still in the minors. The Sox really look old in a couple of places; Theo has some very tough work ahead of him this winter.